I get the China thing. I know nothing about Korean gaming aside from Starcraft being super popular(or at least it apparently was) and apparently MMOs are big.
Is there a quick rundown or source on what's going on that I should be aware of? I apologize if I've asked this before or you've already answered it.
It's fine, there's a reason why Korean gaming industry isn't talked about.
South Korea never really got into global gaming sales until recently. This was due to the social stigma of treating gaming as an unprofitable and immature thing to do. You are right in StarCraft; That game helped in kickstarting career in gaming. Thanks to twitch and youtube, simply livestreaming or recording gameplay has also became viable options.
But game development has always stayed pretty exclusive to Korea and Asian countries. It wasn't around mid-2000s Maplestory began launching servers across the globe. As someone who missed playing MS, this was an amazing thing for me. Most of the games that Korea developed were free to play, and this was the beginning of a very bad sign.
As with any f2p games, there had to be SOMETHING that the devs could money off of, and it was microtransactions. It first started with innocent cosmetics, but then it moved on to more p2w stuff. This happened not only in MS, but also in nearly every pc multiplayer games in Korea, which was majority of games that everyone played. And as time went on, it kept getting egregious.
After the birth of smartphones and mobile gaming, this was when devs REALLY began to monetize everything. In fact, it was so bad, when Diablo Immortal came out people in Korea said it was more "nicer" in terms of monetization compared to other games. Yep, they actually said Diablo Immortal was LESS MONEY-HUNGRY than other games they played.
This is why I fucking hate the likes of Nexon, NetMarble, NCSoft, and other publishers; They are the reason why Korean Gaming Industry gets a bad rep, and gaming as a hobby in general.
Thankfully, some devs decided to take the risk of selling their games internationally, like the Lies of P. So hopefully I can finally start feeling enthusiastic about games made in Korea